Should contested ballots be included, they could swing an outright win for Karzai, writes MATTHEW GREENin Kabul
FOUR DAYS before Afghanistan’s elections, Haji Mohammed, a tribal leader from the southern Kandahar province, received an offer from the local police chief.
If he turned a blind eye to a plan to rig the vote in favour of Hamid Karzai, the president, the police would give him empty ballot boxes to stuff in favour of his nephew, who was running for the provincial assembly.
Mr Mohammed refused. By his account, security forces then gathered all the ballot boxes destined for 45 polling stations in the Shorowak and Regestan districts and filled them with votes marked for Mr Karzai.
“On polling day, there was no election – all the ballot boxes had been filled,” he said at a gathering of elders who had come to Kabul to lodge complaints. “The chief of police of Shorowak told me personally that 29,823 votes were cast in favour of Mr Karzai.”
Another elder interrupted: “The whole population of animals and human beings in Shorowak cannot add up to 29,000!” The ensuing laughter rang hollow.
A deluge of fraud allegations has created a crisis of confidence in Afghanistan’s electoral process that threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the next government and has raised the risk of unrest.
Electoral officials have not released public figures for the number of votes they believe to be suspect.
The number of votes set aside by the four-man team of international and Afghan staff scrutinising the results before they are tallied by an Independent Election Commission (IEC) is significant.
According to international and Afghan sources, ballots from between 10 and 40 per cent of polling stations have been quarantined as suspicious.
Should they be included, the contested votes could be enough to swing the race in favour of an outright victory for Karzai, who needs a simple majority – more than half the votes cast – to avoid a run-off.
Further preliminary results released on Sunday gave him 48.6 per cent of the votes, compared to 31.7 per cent for Abdullah Abdullah, his main rival.
The IEC said on Sunday it had annulled votes from 447 polling stations, out of 26,000, and though more are likely to follow, this is unlikely to satisfy the opposition. Abdullah has alleged a campaign of “massive state-engineered fraud” and pointed to figures on the IEC’s own website which show that some votes already included in the tally look dubious. In the eastern Paktika province, for example, six polling centres showed hundreds of votes for Karzai and none for anyone else.
The most compelling claims come from the southern provinces, where the Taliban insurgency prevented effective monitoring.
Although Karzai, a member of the region’s dominant Pashtun ethnic group, would naturally count on support there, some have become so disillusioned that they backed Abdullah, who is half Pashtun but whose natural base lies in the north.
Karzai’s aides deny any systematic attempt to manipulate the vote, although they acknowledge that provincial officials may have tried to cheat on their own initiative.
Such denials carry little weight with men like Abdul Zahir, a landowner from Uruzgan province, who said he had decided to back Abdullah two months before the election. As one of the wealthiest men in his village of Safed Khar, he believed at least 5,000 people would follow his lead and vote for Abdullah.
“The chief of police took all the voting boxes in the high school and locked the main gates,” Zahir said.
“They didn’t allow me to go inside the school and then they filled up the boxes.” He estimates that 40 people voted, but that 4,700 ballots were cast for Karzai and 650 for Abdullah.
Abdullah’s supporters have little faith in the procedures to challenge suspect votes followed by either the IEC, whose chairman was appointed by Karzai, or a separate, UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission. The ECC says it has received more than 2,000 complaints.
Abdullah has said he will use legal means to challenge disputed results, but warns that his supporters want to take to the streets. As Abdul Karim, another Pashtun elder, put it: “We’re the cousins of Mr Karzai, but we’ve had enough of him.” – (Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2009)